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maztec writes "The New York Times (free soul-sucking registration required) published an article today entitled The Internet's Wilder Side. Apparently, according to the article, 'the Internet has come to resemble a pleasant, well-policed suburb , [but] a little-known neighborhood known as Internet Relay Chat remains the Wild West.' In essence the article concerns itself with how IRC is the breeding ground of all the Internet's Evils, from animal pornography and illegal file sharing to virus making and computer cracking, it all starts here. I'd continue pointing out interesting quotes, but that'd be a waste. Go read it yourself. And if you're on IRC, remember, you're evil. Even if you're one of those do-gooders who uses Mozilla, LFS, or FreeNode servers for software development."

I always suspected I was an evil, conniving, warez trading, mp3 album pre-releasing, movie theater recording and distributing bastard from the moment I typed/server irc.dal.net lo those many years ago. Now I know for sure. Time to go kill some puppies and take pictures and post them in #MurderedPuppies.

This has already happened to one of the Philadelphia news channels, although I must say that they have no clue what newsgroups really are. They ran a special feature about Voicenet, accusing them of supporting child pornography and all kinds of things. They showed the police going into the office and seizing Voicenet assets. I was shocked when it first came on. About twenty minutes into it, I became surpised at just how idiotic the whole thing was. It was all about the "Quickvue" search tool that can basically thumbnail internet content, in particular Usenet newsgroups. Apparently, a number of people were using the tool to thumbnail some of the alt.binaries.*.erotica.* newsgroups with child pornography. The news made it sound like all of this was the fault of Voicenet, and that they were doing something sinister. When Voicenet responded that they were not really able to police the content of the newsgroups, the TV station asserted that this was ridiculous, making it sound like an easy task to monitor every single post that comes into every single of the 120,000+ newsgroups out there for banned content. Just for the record, the servers were seized in January and no charges have yet been filed against Voicenet. I think the authorities are looking for subscriber lists to go directly after people viewing the content. I'm not sure if the seizure was really legal, though.

Just FYI, you can find a transcript of the local news station's (WPVI's), report here [go.com]. WPVI even takes credit for informing the local police. If anything, what WPVI did was abuse of journalism, IMO. They in effect created their own story, and effected the operation of a large ISP as a result.

Police, FBI and other law enforcement agencies seize computer equipment *all the time*. Then if what you're being accused of is pretty unimportant, it'll sit on a shelf in an evidence locker someplace for three months before any forensics guys even take a look at it. This happened to a friend of mine. The police who arrive at the office/your house/whatever know what computers look like, and might have one 'expert' with them, but they will never just take copies of your data, they will take whole machines, even whole networks.

If a computer has had kiddy porn on it, they typically destroy the computer. The whole thing. Maybe the monitor too for good measure. They're not polite about this kind of thing.

Police, FBI and other law enforcement agencies seize computer equipment *all the time*.[snip]The police who arrive at the office/your house/whatever know what computers look like, and might have one 'expert' with them, but they will never just take copies of your data, they will take whole machines, even whole networks.

Hmmmm...

If a computer has had kiddy porn on it, they typically destroy the computer.

So, the key is to get a bunch of old, empty 486 boxen for a font job and build your cases out of non-computer like stuff. Funiture. Lamps. Microwaves.

Cops come in a size everything 'computer like' while you hide the power cord running into your wi-fi enabled lay-z-boy.

"The pirated copies of music, films, games and other software were generally distributed using a separate Internet file-transfer system"

You are right, and they are getting close as well.

With newsgroups it will be even better though, since the groups are actually stored (possession) on company owned servers somewhere, which people pay subscriptions (profit) to access the messages (distribution) from - no, don't give them the idea... (actually I do wonder, how to the 'complete' newsgroup providers get away with this?)

In the US the "complete" newsgroup providers I know of have begun either denying posting access to certain groups, or just filtering out binary content altogether. Easynews especially seems to have been hit hard since that virus made its debut from one of their accounts. Every now and then you see a complaint from someone in the support forum because godzilla deleted binary content - their response is almost always "get over it, things have changed." That old paradigm about carriers of content not being responsible for the actual content seems to have gone out the window - lots of "police," self appointed and otherwise, sending in complaints. Once the complaint is made, the carriers have no choice but to delete it.

I use easynews and regularly READ (important note there) several of the "shady" groups. There's plenty of music and movies and stuff, but the kiddie fans and site crackers have ALL gone underground. LOTS of groups now flooded with PGP posts and encrypted RARs, locked away from everyone but the cliques that communicate elsewhere and use the groups as massive file stores. All that's left in the clear are stories about arrests and rumors of arrests - those folks are all running scared and getting busted even in places like Finland and Singapore. Even many of the bigger MP3 posters have left the building.

I do believe usenet is about to "grow up" the way the web did. Except newsgroups are useless to businesses for anything except support forums, so how this is going to affect things in the future remains to be seen.

Even most of the stuff in the DVD rip groups is intentionally mislabelled and you often hear about folks having their accounts cancelled due to their posts in the music and video groups. The only reason none of this affects me is because I don't post ripped movies or pop music (or illegal shit) - all my trading is done in the "international" and techno music groups where artists are more independant and copyright coverage a bit murkier.

That said, I think these folks must be late to the party. I'm sure there are plenty of newbs on IRC doing illegal shit, but nobody with more than half a brain would be doing it in the open on IRC where your IP can be grabbed in realtime. I'd say the NYT is, as usual, arriving VERY late to this party.

I can't wait to see what happens when they discover newsgroups. Man, their heads will pop.;)

Heh. Newsgroups are less interactive, so I bet they wouldn't be as impressed. They can't watch live conversations between skript kiddiez and warez d00dz, so it'll have less "punch". Personally, that's what I like about newsgroups-- not having to talk to a 14 year old doofus and stroke his tiny ego enough to give me what I'm looking for is worth the spam-wading.

Why hasn't someone set up a second internet over the main one, where IP allocation is dynamic, and untracable? You're only tracable through your IP address, so if you get allocated a random one, and routing still works, and you throw in a little IPsec, voila.

This was some of the most irresponsible journalism I've seen in a long time.

First off, since when is the www a "well policed little suburb?" There's just as much shadiness on the web as there is on IRC. And it's super easy to get at. Just enter it into Google, and you're on your way. All without even touching IRC.

The author also made some funny contradictions. Like the part where he says there are only 50,000 people on all of IRC on at any given time. And then in the next paragraph and the rest of the article he goes on to say how there's no way to know how many people are online. Funny, but a NYT editor should have caught that.

The article was big on assumptions, and short on fact. If they really wanted to bring it home, they should have interviewed a virus writer or hacker who actually uses the system for this kind of thing. That would have made it an interesting piece.

And rather than going on about how bad the thing is, the author should have proposed a solution, or spoken to someone who offers a solution.

I don't know.A lot of this should have been covered in Journalism 101. I guess if the point of the article was fear mongering of the technically challenged, it got it's point across. But it seemed kind of yellow to me.

Even as much of the Internet has come to resemble a pleasant, well-policed suburb, a little-known neighborhood known as Internet Relay Chat remains the Wild West. While copyright holders and law enforcement agencies take aim at their adversaries on Web sites and peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like Napster, I.R.C. remains the place where people with something to hide go to do business.

Sounds like a reasonable statement to me. The cops ARE going after child porn web sites and p2p networks.

The author also made some funny contradictions. Like the part where he says there are only 50,000 people on all of IRC on at any given time. And then in the next paragraph and the rest of the article he goes on to say how there's no way to know how many people are online. Funny, but a NYT editor should have caught that.

Actual NYT quote:

Probably no more than 500,000 people are using I.R.C. worldwide at any time, and many of them are engaged in legitimate activities, network administrators say. [SNIP] It is almost impossible to determine exactly how many people use I.R.C.

Note the careful use of qualifiers probably vs. exactly.

The article was big on assumptions, and short on fact.

Actual NYT quote:

"I.R.C. is where all of the kids come on and go nuts,'' William A. Bierman, a college student in Hawaii who helps develop I.R.C. server software and who is known online as billy-jon, said in a telephone interview. "All of the attention I.R.C. has gotten over the years has been because it's a haven for criminals, which is a very one-sided view.
"The whole idea behind I.R.C. is freedom of speech. There is really no structure on the Internet for policing I.R.C., and there are intentionally no rules. Obviously you're not allowed to hack the Pentagon, but there are no rules like 'You can't say this' or 'You can't do that.'"

The article was full of well researched facts including interviews with the authors of the most popular IRC software.

I guess if the point of the article was fear mongering of the technically challenged, it got it's point across. But it seemed kind of yellow to me.

The article wasn't aimed at you. It was aimed at the general public. It was fairly balanced and described the good, the bad, and the ugly of IRC. You've just got your panties in a twist because you think you're an l337 d00d.

It's kind of interesting that the NYT would engage in what I wouldconsider sensationalist press. I remember that in the late 1990s aGerman TV report came out with a sensationalist article about thefact that there was a "secret document" on the Internet which woulddescribe how to build bombs - and that this would be totallyscandalous.

Of course, that document started saying something like "go to your local grocery store and buy 3 kg of U-235":)

Then use an old buick as a shell. Carefully pack the entire contraption in a few tons of traditional explosives like plastique or nitroglycerin....

The really amusing part is that it isn't all that hard to build an atomic bomb. Only two ingredients are difficult to come by:

1. Enriched U-235 or Pu-239. The enrichment process requires a massive chemicals and refining infrastructure. Pu-239 is produced inside worked reactors and is carefully accounted for by UN watchdogs. Plus the Pu-239 has to be very pure. If it contains a large amount of Pu-238, it will be useless.

2. The initial charge has to be carefully shaped or else the bomb will fizzle. The only known ways to test a design are by actually blowing one up or running computer simulations. The former is rather noticeable, while the later is the reason we put an embargo on computing technology to certain countries.

If you want to know how to build a hydrogen bomb, go do a search for the Progressive article. Good luck on manufacturing a uranium neutron reflector!

There's a fairly good piece on it in John McPhee's "The Curve of Binding Energy" [amazon.com], which gives some information on the topic; I believe that's where I first saw the salad bowl reference.

Most of the ideas behind how to build a bomb are fairly simple. Critical mass and how to calculate it, implosion versus gun type bombs, the effects of reflectors, and so forth. I learned most of the basic math before I dropped my Nuclear Engineering major. Of course, there's no practical way for anything but a large government to make a fusion bomb; ignition temps usually need a fission primer charge. However, it's easy to get something that will cause fission and make a big boom, if you have the fissiles and use some simple approximations ("assume a spherical cow").

Without the detailed computer modeling, you don't anywhere near as big a boom for your kilo of fissile U-235, Pu-240, or U233 (if you're getting exotic). What you get instead is a less efficient reaction, and more of your fissile material goes into the fallout directly rather than fission. Where 40 kilos or so could be optimized to probably around 100 kilotons, a quick-and-sloppy back of the envelope approach would give probably only 1 kiloton. So, yeah, a couple of aluminum salad bowls could be turned into a quick-and-cheap reflector for your bomb, but you would get as big a bang as if you used well machined berylium hemispheres.

The hard part is getting the right material. Stealing fissile material is the easiest for anything besides a government-- isotope separation isn't trivial. And even in the Soviet dis-Union, bomb grade stuff is somewhat guarded. Much better would be some of the FRIGGIN HUGE non-fissile radioisotopes that are essentially just plain missing over there, and could provide a weapon nearly as effective. Stealing one of them, powdering the source (sometimes already done), mixing the powder with a standard fertilizer truck bomb, and blowing it up in a major city would be almost as effective as blowing up a nuke. True, there wouldn't be the lasting sheer "duck and cover" level of hysteria of "someone else has the bomb!", but it would be fairly high. The blast wouldn't level the city, but it could render the bulk of it unusable for a century or so.

While terrorists of Bin Laden's ilk wouldn't hesitate to use a nuke that fell into their hands, they won't concentrate their construction efforts on fission or fusion weapons. Radiological weapons are a much more practical ambition for them to be seeking.

The most dangerous materials are the extremely "hot" ones that are fresh out of a reactor. In order to be that hot, they have a half-life of seconds to barely a few years.

Cesium-137 has a half life about 30 years; long enough to last, short enought for relatively small volumes to be quite hellishly radioactive-- about 80 curies per gram, if I recall.

In the end, you'll pretty much do nothing more than increase everyone's chance of getting cancer.<sarcasm>What an effective terrorist weapon</sarcasm>

You've obviously never been personally involved in political debates on locating nuclear facilities; a large fraction of the population has hysterical phobias about radioactivity, even when there is no real danger. (I've seen a ditz go into hysterics on learning her skeleton was mildly radioactive from the natural potassium.)

Furthermore, while there will be few, if any, people getting an LD50/60 dose from a radiation dust bomb, cleaning up such an irradiated area could be prohibitively expensive. Failure to clean it up would result in an highly non-trivial increase in cancer rates in the area-- enough to make five-pack-a-day smoking look perfectly safe.

There's also the question as to whether or not Bin Laden would have competent enough people to know what they're stealing. For example, spreading a bunch of plutonium (Alpha Emitter) would be laughable.

Have you even taken a radiation health physics class? Alpha emitters are quite dangerous under the right conditions-- as you yourself noted, the real danger is in inhaling or ingesting radioisotopes. Furthermore, when you deal with a radiation source that's internal, alphas are about the worst of the lot, due to the high absorbtion of the radiation over short distnaces. As I noted, this is why you powderize the radioisope beforehand for this sort of weapon: to increase the chance of dust particles being inhaled.

The threat from a radiologic dust bomb isn't the initial short term exposure; it's the long term threat.

This makes it sound like all you have to do is plug a windows machine into the net and your in trouble. As much as I can't stand working with windows I find this to be over the top.

Actually, it's not over the top at all. There are a number of worms that will infect a Windows box as soon as it's plugged in. I've seen a new XP install get infected within 20 minutes of first bootup.

No, he's right. I was putting together a new computers for brother just before christmas. Here is what I did:1) Installed windows 2000 from the CD, not connected to the internet.2) Powered down the computer and plugged into cable modem, via ethernet.3) Powered on computer and immediately ran Windows Update.

Before I could even select which updates to install, I had a windows messaging box (the Windows functionality, not MSN messager) pop up. Anyway, I finished installing all the updates, and then proceded to install a virus checker and spyware removal programs, and the virus checker indeed did find stuff (I forget what).

So within 30 seconds of connecting the computer to the internet, a virus had already exploited a flaw in Windows, and probably had already infected the system. But I had definately been infected within 30 minutes of connecting to the internet, because it took less time than that to install the updates and virus checker.

Well, I'm making a living right now because of that, so in a way I'm glad it's actually true. If you plug a Windows box directly into a high-speed Internet connection without updating everything first, the probability that you will be ownz0r3d rapidly approaches 1.

If no firewall/NAT router is present, then it's absolutely inevitable that you'll get nailed on a Windows box. If the Windows box is pre-configured with a software firewall that's enabled, and fully updated, your odds of survival are good.

I spent much of yesterday cleaning up things for a single client who had bought a new Dell a few months ago and put it directly on a SDSL connection. It was literally riddled with nasty stuff. She had called me when it started the Sasser-driven shutdown process - until that happened she had written off the computer's misbehavior as normal.

And I have a lot of users in similar situations. Basically, most computer users buy it and expect it to work. They don't know about or care about security, and frankly shouldn't have to.

But I can't complain, because Windows helps put food on my table. When they finally get it right, it'll be time for a new career!

IRC is actually even older than that and it was invented by a fellow called Jarkko Oikarinen in University of Oulu in Finland in August 1988. Read about it here [irc.org]. First servers that formed the the original IRC network are still online participating the IRCnet [ircnet.org] network.

IRC was born during summer 1988 when Jarkko "WiZ" Oikarinen wrote the first IRC client and server at the University of Oulu, Finland (where he was working at the Department of Information Processing Science).

It's not entirely applicable, but your comment reminded me of a quote:

"The only freedom which counts is the freedom to do what some other people think to be wrong. There is no point in demanding freedom to do that which all will applaud. All the so-called liberties or rights are things which have to be asserted against others who claim that if such things are to be allowed their own rights are infringed or their own liberties threatened. This is always true, even when we speak of the freedom to worship, of the right of free speech or association, or of public assembly. If we are to allow freedoms at all there will constantly be complaints that either the liberty itself or the way in which it is exercised is being abused, and, if it is a genuine freedom, these complaints will often be justified. There is no way of having a free society in which there is not abuse. Abuse is the very hallmark of liberty."
-- Lord Chief Justice Halisham

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear. And the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." -- Lovecraft.

IRC is still more difficult to use than AOL chat rooms and largely the domain of techies. Sure bad stuff happens there because it's not part of the mainstream, but I don't know that it's worse there than anywhere else......god help them if they find USENET.

IRC developed a successive series of safety features to prevent this from happening. First, they designed the network to drop you for flooding when you did a/list *, and later, they just prevented it entirely - at least on efnet. (The one true irc network.)

I haven't tried doing one on openprojects or anything like that, though.

It was just another Wednesday on the sprawling Internet chat-room network known as I.R.C. In a room called Prime-Tyme-Movies, users offered free pirated downloads of "The Passion of the Christ'' and "Kill Bill Vol. 2.'' In the DDO-Matrix channel, illegal copies of Microsoft's Windows software and "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,'' an Xbox game, were ripe for downloading. In other chat rooms yesterday, whole albums of free MP3's were hawked with blaring capital letters. And in a far less obtrusive channel, a hacker may well have been checking his progress of hacking into the computers of unsuspecting Internet users.

Even as much of the Internet has come to resemble a pleasant, well-policed suburb, a little-known neighborhood known as Internet Relay Chat remains the Wild West. While copyright holders and law enforcement agencies take aim at their adversaries on Web sites and peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like Napster, I.R.C. remains the place where people with something to hide go to do business.

Probably no more than 500,000 people are using I.R.C. worldwide at any time, and many of them are engaged in legitimate activities, network administrators say. Yet that pirated copy of Microsoft Office or Norton Utilities that turns up on a home-burned CD-ROM may well have originated on I.R.C. And the Internet viruses and "denial of service'' attacks that periodically make news generally get their start there, too. This week, the network's chat rooms were abuzz with what seemed like informed chatter about the Sasser worm, which infected hundreds of thousands of computers over the weekend.

"I.R.C. is where you are going to find your 'elite' level pirates,'' said John R. Wolfe, director for enforcement at the Business Software Alliance, a trade group that fights software piracy. "If they were only associating with each other and inbreeding, maybe we could coexist alongside them. But it doesn't work that way. What they're doing on I.R.C. has a way of permeating into mainstream piracy.''

Two weeks ago, the F.B.I., in conjunction with law enforcement agencies in 10 foreign countries, announced an operation called Fastlink, aimed at shutting down the activities of almost 100 people suspected of helping operate illegal software vaults on the Internet. The pirated copies of music, films, games and other software were generally distributed using a separate Internet file-transfer system, said a Justice Department spokesman, but the actual pirates generally used I.R.C. to communicate and coordinate with one another.

"The groups targeted as part of Fastlink are alleged to have used I.R.C. to have committed their crimes, like almost all other warez groups,'' the spokesman, Michael Kulstad, said in a telephone interview. Warez, pronounced like wares, is techie slang for illegally copied software.

When I.R.C. started in the 1980's, it was best known as a way for serious computer professionals worldwide to communicate in real time. It is still possible - though sometimes a bit difficult - to find mature technical discussions among the tens of thousands of I.R.C. chat rooms, known as channels, operating at any one time. There are also respectable I.R.C. systems and channels - some operated by universities or Internet service providers - for gamers seeking opponents or those who want to talk about sports or hobbies.

Still, I.R.C. perhaps most closely resembles the cantina scene in "Star Wars'': a louche hangout of digital smugglers, pirates, curiosity seekers and the people who love them (or hunt them). There seem to be I.R.C. channels dedicated to every sexual fetish, and I.R.C. users speculate that terrorists also use the networks to communicate in relative obscurity. Yet I.R.C. has its advocates, who point to its legitimate uses.

"I.R.C. is where all of the kids come on and go nuts,'' William A. Bierman, a college student in Hawaii who helps develop I.R.C. server software and who is known online as billy-jon, said in a telephone interview. "All of the attention I.R.C. has

The article implies IRC is the cause of the evils. IRC is a medium, not a cause. It's just a way of organising so called "evils". You still have to want to get to the "evil" material in the first place.

I believe the article proves you are incorrect. IRC is not just a medium, apparently.Yet that pirated copy of Microsoft Office or Norton Utilities that turns up on a home-burned CD-ROM may well have originated on I.R.C.
Pirated software can originate from IRC itself (not the clients or the servers)The whole idea behind I.R.C. is freedom of speech. There is really no structure on the Internet for policing I.R.C., and there are intentionally no rules. Obviously you're not allowed to hack the Pentagon, but there are no rules like 'You can't say this' or 'You can't do that.'
You can hack the pentagon from IRC, you just arent supposed to.

While the submitter might be right in hinting that the New York Times, does not know jack about the internet, they do have a point.
IRC _IS_ the breeding ground for all sorts of weird stuff, be that legal or illegal, and although many people use it for strictly legal purposes, it could do with some cleanup.
The question remains though, should IRC be censored along with everything else (little by little, our precious internet is going mainstream), or should it remain as it is?
Personally I am for the staying of IRC, yet I also share the concerns of the Times.

The "problem" with IRC is that it connects people. IRC isnt a breeding ground for weird stuff, humanity is.

The main beef is that IRC is an old, open protocol with countless free servers out there. How are you supposed to charge 10 cents per instant message when such things exist?

Babies are safer when you write a lot of checks. Beware free things, they're inherently evil and unamerican. IRC is like a slum (he doesnt mention which network, I'll assume they're all the same). AOL chat rooms are where high class individuals masturbate.

The WEB is mainstream. Most people just can't tell the difference between the www, ftp, e-mail, irc, and usenet. I get the strangest looks when I tell some people to type "eff tee pee colon slash slash" sometimes...

The question remains though, should IRC be censored along with everything else...

Umm, what's censored currently? Nobody reviews my webpages before I put them up. There are plenty of porn and even illegal porn sites out there that you can get onto if you want to spend the time. Warez exist still and with a little work i coudl probalby find any program authentification code I want. The only place there might be censorship would/could be Google or other search engines if they blocked certain searches.

If by censorship, you mean when illegal activity is found it is acted against, it has been censored for a very long time. Long before the web became a household word, IRC warez were being traded and people were being arrested for doing so. Police are already in IRC looking for peadophiles just as they are chat rooms.

<b1lbo> The NYT has an article on us being 'evil'! Just saw it on Slashdot, go see it:-P
<creat1ve> What?
<creat1ve> Damn.. they suck!!
<creative> hack-bot, DDOS nytimes.com
<hack-bot> Initializing DDOS

...

<l1ght> Haha, nytimes.com down:-) That'll teach them to badmouth irc, thank god for that Slammer virus that let us build up those zombies!

That is such an obvious fake. If you're going to post made-up IRC discussions, you should at least use proper IRC grammar, such as no capital letters, missing or incorrect punctuation, etc. You're not even trying to be believable!

You mean the Discovery channel distributes on IRC? How many times have I seen two Rhinos doing the nasty with some British snooty guy narrating on PBS? Please, NY Times. This is nothing new. Heck, I even got a shot of flies getting busy [mac.com] on my balcony. You would think these New York City folk wouldn't be such prudes.

The problem that the corporate world has with IRC is that it's a network of humans, exchanging ideas and conversing freely. And, to make matters worse, they aren't paying a monthly/weekly/hourly fee to do so.

I've read a lot of these "watch out for these free social based things on the internet, the only way to keep your kids safe is to stay on amazon.com with your credit card in hand" articles.

The internet is nothing remotley like a suburb, it's the wild west all over again complete with brothels and shoot outs. IRC and USENET where the orginal storehouses of sub-legal activities before P2P came along.

I think the luddite who wrote the article means "Amazon, Yahoo, MSN, AOL" instead of "the internet." The internet is a den of sin and debauchery. People are stealing things all the time; code, pictures, software. It can't be enforced because any action by the enforcers will be circumvented. This scares people, and so they stay in their little gated communities and talk about how wonderful life is. These are the same people who sued Hustler and put warning labels on CDs: They don't want to admit to there being A) People different from themselves and B) Sex, drugs, alcohol, or other naughty things.

They are the thought police we've been warned about. (A few of them are in alt.sex.pictures.baaa and then condemn us for being in alt.sex.pictures.chicks)

"Quite often, once they get their hands on a prerelease, they will use I.R.C. as the first distribution before it goes out into the wider Internet," Brad A. Buckles, the [RIAA]'s executive vice president for antipiracy efforts, said in a telephone interview.

One has to give the author credit for getting one thing right, though:

In some ways, the biggest problem is Microsoft Windows itself. Windows has holes that can allow a hacker to install almost anything on a computer that lacks a protective program or device called a firewall. Users' vulnerability can be compounded if they have not installed the latest patches from Microsoft.

I live on IRC and sure as 'hell' don't consider myself to be evil. This lame ass journo probably got flamed and didn't know what do to. IRC is better than IM and is used by anyone and everyone in the dev community. I can't imagine participating in any of the FOSS projects that I do without IRC - it just wouldn't be possible.
Speaking of which, is there a/. specific channel on Freenode?

IRC isn't any different, really, than a web page or a video cast. It's all just bits. The reason NYT can't understand this isn't that they're dumb, it's that they're inherently journalists not technologists.

IRC isn't "where animal porn comes from", animal porn comes from people who like animal porn. Failure to apprehend this fact smacks of gross stupidity. IRC is just a chatroom. It's exactly the same as an AOL chatroom or an ICQ chatroom. The room isn't the place, the conversants are the place. Conversations can happen Anywhere. Plus our Constitution (you know, that thing Dubya keeps trying to shred) GARUANTEES us the right to free speech and peacable assembly. IRC is not some magical source of villainy, it's every streetcorner in America rolled into one blank page awaiting words.

IRC isn't the problem. People are the problem. And we already have the solution. It's called the code of law. Not that the law is always the best law, but my point is that IRC is neither good nor evil, merely a tool. People who realize this can take the proper step, which is to try to fight the problem not the symptom. People who don't realize this make total asses of themselves in very public fora.

"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire"d'Oh!" - Homer

PS, I didn't RTFA because I'm too lazy. Did YOU rtfa?;-) Okay, then flame on, but please post a link without registration so I can rtfa and flame you back. One.

One more established form of media just disparages another because it doesn't understand it, or because it fears it. It's a shame, because average newspaper readers inevitably equate, "IRC = bad," and continue to spread the hearsay when it comes up in conversation.

What are they smoking, anyways? The web is anything but a well-policed suburb. If anything, it's a middle school that is in perpetual recess. They just know if they were to apply these same arguments to the web that people would not stand for their bullshit.

Once again, social acceptability shows itself to be completely arbitrary.

Although my 65 year-old father has been using newsgroups for years for his cancer support contacts the mainstream media still doesn't have a clue about them. It's kind of amazing since these weenies don't have anything else to do other than dig up things to try and scare the public with.

As for IRC I'm sure it's the pit of sin and mania that they describe but really, so what? Any communication stream will be used that way!

I've tried IRC a couple of time but have to admit I don't know how to use it properly. I've tried about five different IRC clients and still am completely lost when I try and do anything.

Maybe if I wait long enough it will be replaced by something that doesn't confuse me.:)

In some ways, the biggest problem is Microsoft Windows itself. Windows has holes that can allow a hacker to install almost anything on a computer that lacks a protective program or device called a firewall. Users' vulnerability can be compounded if they have not installed the latest patches from Microsoft.

Finally, its good to see it in the NYT. It was starting to get old seeing it on/. every day without anybody else picking it up....

The suburbs is where all the s#!t happens that everyone *thinks* is limited to the "inner city".

Leading market for gang growth and presence? The burbs.

Leading market of drug users and drug spending? The burbs.

Leading market for pr0n? Burbs.

By far the leading market for SUVs (speaking of so-called evil)? Burbs.

Number one users of so-called Earth killing pollutants? Burbs.

The list goes on and on and on...

Why do so many entities (read: media) STILL portray the suburbs as some sort of pure, loving, pastures of solice? The suburbs are like a nice, ripe tomato: All shiny and pretty on the surface, but a disgusting mess 1mm below the surface.

It is still possible - though sometimes a bit difficult - to find mature technical discussions among the tens of thousands of I.R.C. chat rooms, known as channels, operating at any one time.

What the hell? How is it difficult to find mature technical discussions? What do you want to discuss? Windows? Type "/list windows". Linux? "/list linux". When the results are complete, click the channel you want. Simple. Use your head, if results come back "#linux_sluts - Sluts who get naked and slutty for linux guys XXX", then chances are that's not a good place to discuss the latest kernel.

These news articles are always reporting about unnecessary things. Why target IRC? AOL has the same type of shit. Take a look in the member created chat rooms... "m4m will swallow" "my dog, ur place" "azn m4 hamster" "canadian hookers" etc..

Uh... it has? Are we using the same internet? The internet is full of spammers, annoying flash and pop-up advertising, worms, spyware, and all kinds of other undesirable things. If anything, it sounds more like the ghetto to me, not a well-policed suburb.

We use IRC every day for legitimate work. We're not the only ones. Don't take my word for it though. Check out this link [ircxpro.com]. We progam, chat every day on IRC, and use source control tools to get our work done. This article while accurate in many ways was very unbalanced. That is a mark of poor journalism and is only done to sell newspapers. This is expected of publications like The Enquirer, but should not be the mark of the NYT.

What a miserable article. It makes me sick. "Hackers gone wild." (It's always hackers, right? It's never, ever crackers, or phreaks, or software/music pirates, or whatever. Hackers, yes. Drill it home. Though the author does seem to know about other terms - like "warez", which the article carefully defines.) Love the SW reference. Can you picture righteous Obi Wan Ashcroft? "IRC... you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy." A breeding ground for terrorists. OK, all set. Pack it up - we're done. Why read any more? We'll just have to outlaw this, along with guns, 747's, non-GPS cellphones, non-M$ systems, boxcutters, etc.

"It is still possible, though sometimes a bit difficult, to find mature technical discussions..." Oh, come on! Which is it? Is it careening toward almost impossible, or do you just not know how to use IRC or what to look for? Then they have Bill Beer^h^h^h^h Bierman from U. of Hawaii who talks about how the "kids" use it to "go nuts." Girls Gone Wild - IRC!! "...seem to be...dedicated to every sexual fetish!" Love this article! It's got everything! Violence, fear, sex, depravity. You have to admit - this kind of thing will sell newspapers.

In my 8+ years on IRC, I've helped countless users with PC problems, helped hunt down a script kiddie that was beating on a IRC network (that will go unnamed), founded a dozen or so channels that have gone and done quite well for themselves after naming a successor to (this is true!), I either single-handedly or helped saved 3 fellow users from killing themselves due to personal or financial problems.

You go download a IRC client, sign onto ANY IRC network, hang around for a month on a channel, then you tell ME that IRC is evil.

With groups or people, there will always be evil, but the balance of good always seems to outweigh evil in certain aspects.

IRC has simply unleashed the power of international relations upon each other. So we are unwittlingly amabassadors for our own state or country.So make the best of it folks, the author and the poster needs to get on IRC and experience it first-hand for a year, THEN make his or her report.

IRC is a niche thing, so I don't think it is very silly the NYT "discovers" it now.

It can only have been in the last few years with popularization of the internet that non IT people would be on the net enough to hear the term "IRC"...enough for it to move into a reporter's vocabluary.

Earlier ( and still many present clients ) irc clients had very unfriendly interfaces.

Now there is chatzilla and gaim which make it friendly enough for ordinary people to venture into it.

I still run into many IT people who never heard of IRC or even USENET.

Regarding their other point which people made fun of, usenet is wild if you look at decorum, but its not wild if you think that one time you had to know something to use it and now anyone with a browser can go to Google and read it like a blog.

IRC is just a tool for communication. Just like every other communication tool it could be used for both good and bad things.

Newspapers are for some reason considered inherently good, TV stations too... although I could post quite oposite example.

In Serbia, under Milosevic regime *all* classic media (TV, radio, press) were actually his main tools for spreading nationalistic (fascistic) euphoria. Naturaly, there were some independent media, but they were always under heavy preasure.

Maybe such misuse of classic media is always the case when some country goes to war without proper reason?

In 1996, eight months after Serbia was connected again to Internet, mass scale protest against rose in Belgrade and other cities due to obvious electoral fraud. Web, email and IRC were main tools for us to stay informed and to spread the correct information. IRC was remedy for many of us to remain normal in such desperate situation (regime's represion was very tough in that particular period).

Two years later, during NATO bombing, while wondering wether to hate more those who bombed me or those who had caused the bombing, IRC was tool for expressing thoughts and spreading hope. And for those who like emotional scenes, I will never forget one situation when I was online in the moment when air strike alert started. One by one, people reported that. Really scary, when you see list of towns and cities reporting, just like a flood. There is no other medium that in real time could represent some situation happening to so dispersed persons.

Or just in one sentence: there is no inherently 'good' or 'bad' media, they are all good but easily misused.